X-Files

Can't believe I've never seen this show before.  I borrowed Season 5 from the library the other day and that was my life for the next two weeks.

I hardly need to talk it up much: it's had enough fans who knew long before I finally got around to it how brilliant it was.  I just have to talk about the things that really stood out for me:

First, the dialogue is something else.  I have to be honest, from the first episode I kept thinking I've never heard anybody talk like this in my life.  Scully and Mulder go into incredible monologues about science and the unknown, how they think and feel about any number of subjects, very elaborately and unselfconsciously.  I've never been able to talk like that in real life.  I've tried and always got ridiculed.  The dialogue is more otherworldly than the extraterrestrials and monsters that they encounter, but it is so poetic and clear and I love it.  When they speak, I wish that I could live in that world for just a while and be able to speak my mind in the same way I never could with anyone else.

Second, while they don't shy away from the gross-out, it's not what this show aims for.  This show does not go for the easy scare; most episodes can just build and build the tension and never let you feel the release.  When an episode comes like the doll in mid-season ("I want to play"), they've earned the right to make you jump.  They've figured out how to make the scary stuff matter: they make you care about Mulder and Scully because they try so hard to be good people.  Scully is a strong woman that loves her family and her partner and will never back down to protect them.  Mulder is a driven man who fights for his beliefs and his undying trek to discover the truth.  To see that threatened episode after episode by the aliens first and the variety of freaks after (both supernatural and the all-too-human), that is a lever of intensity I haven't felt in a while.

Lastly, there are plenty of scary shows that take themselves way too-seriously.  The X-Files doesn't.  Like their scares, they don't go for the easy joke.  But when they do, I couldn't stop laughing.  The vampire episode, "Bad Blood", made me laugh so hard I cried.

So now I'm a fan... years after it matters, but hey, I can say that this story can last past its time.